Metro Winds Read Online Free PDF Page A

that colour when he expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, the aunt thought dizzily, feeling her blood vibrate under her skin and hoping she would not faint.
    She decided they should walk a little to escape the press. Around the corner, they came unexpectedly to a church and the aunt led the girl inside. The coolness beyond the arched stone doorway was so profound that she could have wept for the relief of it. They sat in the very last pew until the glimmering stars that had begun to wink before the aunt’s eyes had faded. Then she glanced sideways at the girl and wondered if she had not been drawn into the church for a reason. The girl had a dangerously potent look. The aunt uttered a silent prayer that she should be safe, while the girl sat immobile beside her. Of course she was a heathen, her sister having abandoned their religion, but in the eyes of the church it was better to be a heathen than a member of another church. The latter went to hell, while heathens and unbaptised babies went to the grey eternity of limbo.
    The aunt didn’t believe in limbo anymore. Not exactly. But she didn’t disbelieve either. Her mind was not shaped for such decision-making. She had a nostalgic affection for the innocent rites of her childhood faith, and in old age would be able to draw her religion tightly back around her like a beloved shawl.
    The girl liked the cold smell of the church, the cool tobacco-dark shadows striping pictures of dim, tortured saints and the faint humming of the stone under her feet. She liked the little banks of candles and the font of water and the smell of wood polish on the pews.
    Finally the aunt touched her and motioned that they should go. If God existed, and the girl was in some sort of danger, perhaps He would see fit to intervene. The aunt could do no more.

    The performance they had come to see was merely competent and afterwards the aunt said it was a shame but one could never be sure with violinists. Excellence was as likely as mediocrity. But it was a pity.
    Neither had the girl enjoyed the performance, finding the music too consciously intricate. The violin had sounded to her like something begging to be free. She had a sudden profound longing to hear the disordered cadences of the waves and the yearning grew until it hurt the bones in her chest to keep it in. It was the first time in her life that she had consciously desired anything and she wondered if wanting was something that came with the bleeding.
    Outside it was hotter than ever and the sun still shone, although it was now early evening.
    The aunt wished she had arranged a taxi so they could go immediately and directly to her friend’s apartment. With the crowd swelling around them, there was no chance of hailing one, so they walked, searching for a telephone. The aunt’s eyes watered at the brightness of the sun and she flinched when sunlight flashed off an opening window and stabbed into her eyes.
    The girl was thinking that the heat was a trapped beast prowling the streets with its great, wet, red tongue hanging out, gasping in the exhausted air. If someone did not let it out soon, it would go mad and tear everything to pieces.
    At last they saw a passing taxi and the aunt hailed it gratefully. To her irritation, when they arrived at her friend’s home, he announced that it was too hot to stay in. He had organised for them to eat in a nearby café, but at least they were borne there in a car with air-conditioning. The friend was very like the aunt in his plump pinkness, although he was somewhat sharper in mind and manner. His eyes were a beautiful transparent aqua that reminded the girl of the sea on certain days when an unexpected beam of light penetrated a dark sky, and they settled on her avidly.
    â€˜You did not say she was beautiful,’ he said.
    The aunt was almost suffocated with all the replies she might have made, from the inappropriateness of giving impressionable young girls such notions, to the